Is there any forum for Desktop Authority?

It seems that the original community around Desktop Authority has been gutted. I can't find a forum, the old site redirects to Dell and that redirects to this "itninja.com" social network, and the only threads are company-created, some posts that surface first are 7 years old. I'm trying to ask a question about some details and I can't seem to find a human in an active role that I can ask. Is that just me, or am I not finding where everyone went to? Thanks.

Answer Summary: For peer-to-peer support, look to ITNinja. All content tagged with Desktop Authority are collected here at http://www.itninja.com/desktopauthority
For an official online support community, look to http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/endpoint-management/desktop-authority

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Bob, your answer was 2 months ago now and you said you hoped to have a community up and running soon. Can you comment on the plans and timelines for a desktop authority support community? Is ITNinja the permanent official place?
Mark

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Hello everyone,

Kevin Robinson here the worldwide support manager for Desktop Authority. You will be pleased to know we have taken on board customers comments, and the need for a new area, and as of this Monday 24th November 2014 the new DA community is now live in the Dell Tech Center!

You can find the link below - its been a long time coming but I hope you enjoy collaborating in this new space:

I was able to successfully configure DA on a Windows Server 2012 VM but how do I go about installing the DA client on a workstation? Doesn’t the DA Manager need to communicate with the workstations in order to apply any profile changes\etc.?

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I'm Bob Crosley, the product manager for Desktop Authority. There has been a painful transition period between the end of the scriptlogic.com domain and the creation of a new Dell Desktop Authority community. In the meantime, you can ask questions here, and if I don't have answers, I will get you to the right person to answer them. We do hope to have a community up and running soon.

I'm sorry this has been inconvenient, and will do whatever I can to help resolve any issues until the new community is available.

Bob, Personally, I miss the forum. I was not much more than a lurker but it was a major reference for me. Sltracebrowser, the apilibrary, the issues other DA users were experiencing, these were great resources for me. Now our Dell rep is suggesting we look at KACE appliances and knows nothing about DA. When management asked whether we should buy 3 more years of DA, I had to pause. DA's patch management and Spyware add-on's EOL were just annouced for 2014. Sounds like a death-nell for DA, to me. However, I'm a believer. ScriptLogic (and Kix) has been good to me. Bob, you've been with this for awhile now too. So, is Windows 8 ever going to be supported in DA? Will DA even ever see another release? Should we be looking at other products? Maybe these are questions you can answer and maybe these are questions that can be better answered by your silence. I suspect there are a number of other "ITninjas" out there who want to know these answers too.
Dave

Dave, DA is not going anywhere. We will support Windows 8 in the forthcoming DA 9.1 release which should be available in the next couple months, and then we get right to work on DA 9.2. The Spyware add-on was actually end of life'd with the release of 9.0 last summer, we're just finishing the process. The patching component is being end-of-life'd as the KACE appliance will be the primary patching option for our customers going forward. With the union of DA and the KACE appliance, we're free to let the KACE appliance handle the traditional client-management tasks like software distribution, patching, asset tracking, etc., and leave DA to focus on the user environment, the things we've done well historically.

I'm very sorry that our integration pains have left you with the idea that DA is going away. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As a KACE and DA Express customer I am glad to hear more integration of the two are coming. I was at Dell World and KACE Konference this year and no one really knew anything about what was going to happen with DA when I asked around.

Please bring us a public form space for Desktop Authority. I too was looking for the forums to see when Windows 8 support would be included. I know Windows 8 is a little tricky monster with UAC being harder to disable, and DA runs better with UAC disabled.

While we don't have plans to roll out Windows 8, rumor is that Windows 8.1 *MAY* bring back the option to boot to the desktop and have a start menu. If this ends up holding true, then Windows 8.1 would likely be our next evolution after Windows 7 Professional.

If the squeaky wheel gets the grease… I miss the DA forums too and would LOVE to see the forum brought back. I don’t believe I posted much on it, but I’ve often visited it for product resolutions, new release updates and even to get new project ideas. It was a valuable resource for me and truly missed. Please bring it back!!

I've had a problem getting the admin service to install on a 2003 domain controller since upgrading to 9 in March. I just upgraded to 9.1 in hopes it would fix it but it did not. Is anyone else having this trouble. I don't really like using the web interface over the program either. I've used da back when it was 7 on a full company and we have just had it on a few branches at my current company and now they want to roll it out everywhere but I think I'm going to look at alternatives before we do that. Any recommendations? I'm pretty disappointed with it right now. I know that we only have to have it on one domain controller but we need it at each location in case they lose connectivity they can still map drives to the branch server where company apps run.

We are running 9.0.3 on multiple 2003 DC's without issues. I have not installed 9.1 yet but plan to soon. If memory serves me correctly, we had a slight issue with the admin service but a simple stop and reinstall fixed it for us. Have you tried removing the admin service and then reinstalling it? Verify your using the correct login credentials for the service (one account needs domain admin rights, the other only domain user rights).

For what it's worth, I didn't care for the web interface at first but it definitely grew on me over time. I really like it now. :-)

We finally got it working Friday. We could install the service it just wouldn't start. We had to change the domain controller policy to allow login for domain users because of the impersonation of the domain user account for sluser. I put in a feature request to change this in the future to not allow local login for domain users on a domain controller.

I haven't had any issues or problems so far. We are running it on a limited (75 users) before we push it out to the other 1000. I only have basic configuration on it too like mapping drives, printers, mainly basic stuff. Its not really doing anything advanced.

I agree with CosmoC, it is good to see some activity. DA is such a tricky animal to get working correctly. Dsitton if you have trouble with the validation logic just post here and we can try to help. The logic can be pretty bizarre at times - How many times have you puzzled over the byzantine machinations of the "and/or/equal/not equal/greater than/less than" validation logic for file versions - I defy someone to explain it to a non-expert (or even an expert!) though I will admit that puzzling over the logs for endless hours can be fun and entertaining ;-)

Speaking of which, we are currently puzzling over scheduled nightly jobs that don't seem to run all the time and the frustrations of attempting to wake up all the computers at midnight to run updates. Currently we have multiple rules (each rule can only wake up 99 computers) that map ip address to mac address to computer name and they have to be manually updated each week. Has anyone had better luck?